Magnetic stars. (Frerard, Petekey)

Chapter one - scratchomania

// magnetic stars. //

Chapter one - scratchomania

behold. another semi autobiographical, gross poetic story by yours truly. (i say semi autobiographical because i don't intentionally manipulate people, although others don't perceive it that way. also i have never dated a teacher in my life lmao)

just a real quick note before we start—u can guess that i get a ton of comments and may i just ask that you don't leave comments like 'same', 'lol' or 'me af' because I get at least six duplicates of these from different people every day and it's really getting old. also please don't post lyrics because i get too many comments that are literally just lyrics.

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Gerard didn't realise he was doing it until just a few moments too late, and his legs were covered in little spots of blood again.

A rather smothering feeling of guilt stifled his lungs, and he fumbled for the tissue box on his bedside table to dab up the broken scabs on his thighs with trembling hands. He knew he ought to stop. He knew that now was the time to stop, but the sickly draw of scratching overwhelmed all thoughts of the consequential guilt.

He was unfocused, lost in his own head, held in place magnetically by the spatter of scabs over his legs. There was blood caught under his fingernails, and his eyes were stinging, and his breath was quivering– but there still wasn't a chance going to stop.

And that was the way his mother found him when she came home: sprawled on his bedroom floor, streaks of blood down his legs, shaking his hands like a child.

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Allegedly (according to Doctor Morgan), Gerard was supposed to have found solace in the fact that this progressively worsening 'quirk', as his mother called it, came with a diagnosis of dermatillomania.

Donna seemed to take it very calmly, but Gerard could hear the tremor in her voice as she asked about treatment options, help for anxiety, spinner rings and the likes of those things. Gerard bit his tongue at that. He didn't need 'treatment'. He didn't need to hear everything he'd been told before, simply from a new mouth of another faceless doctor. He didn't need a new condition to add to his list.

He wished away the word, such an ugly word - 'dermatillomania' - and crumpled it away in one of the dusty, unused files at the back of his mind. He fumbled in his mother's bag for his notebook, ignoring the drone of the doctor's voice as she spoke about occupational therapy, then quietly noted down his own name for his new condition: scratchomania.

It had a nice ring to it, he thought, and it was much less of a mouthful than that other word, the ugly, technical, medical one he'd scrambled into pieces to save himself the chore of remembering.

"Scratchomania," he mumbled to himself that night as he swiftly skinned away the scarlet-black mottle on his inner arm. The rush came and went like a shooting star. He felt empty a second after it was gone.

He taped a plaster over the stinging mark, quietly pushing down the guilt, and sank down into his bed and flicked his lamp off with a sigh. "Scratchomania," he repeated. Yes, he was quite satisfied with that. He closed his eyes and noted it down in his orange folder; it felt like a rather orange word.

He lay awake, tapping at his wrists for a few minutes before he was submerged in dappled coal and crimson dreams about the hideous concept of tomorrow and the scars that would come with it.

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Gerard loathed tomorrows. Today was today only, and that was that, so rather obviously (to him at least), there was no weight nor value whatsoever in thinking about a day that was not today. Gerard loathed lots of things, and 'tomorrow' was just a single grain of sand in a massive sea of hate- although there was one thing that stood out very strikingly in that sea that had been on his mind a lot lately. Art.

Gerard despised art more than anything in the world.

He used to adore it. He could pour his worst fears and everything that hurt him most onto a canvas, like lancing his stomach and his lungs open and spreading his insides over the page- but then he could make it beautiful, make it explode in fireworks of colour and blissful agony, like tearing the wound further open and cauterising and stitching it at the same time. He could shut his feelings off by forcing them out in spectrums of paint and lines, losing himself in the way the brush curved and the way that summer could cry out to him in winter the moment he spilled sunbeam gold over paper.

Art used to be passion, and the scorching fire of joy, but now it burned his fingertips, suffocating him in the stifling fumes of the paint and its choking colours. It didn't heal his injuries anymore. It split him apart by the skin, in an excruciating burst of curdled bones and a confetti of scabs.

He blamed the SSRIs for that.

Granted, he blamed the SSRIs for most things, but it wasn't like it was unjustified. They did fuck him up pretty bad. And he hadn't exactly been stable in the first place.

And now he'd lost his safe place; his sanctuary had been inside the pastels and acrylics and canvases, but now they would cry out in fear instead of joy if he tried to touch them, now they would crawl under his skin with a static acid itch if he even contemplated painting.

He was lost, and all he could find solace in was peeling off his own skin until his body was a painting in itself, claret-stained and martyred, all for the sake of a substitute for fucking art.

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The stars grounded Gerard.

It was like a magnetic repulsion, pushing him down to earth with the weight of a thousand suns each time he looked up at the night sky.

He searched for the stars when he needed grounding. He felt like he was drifting, sometimes. His mind was floating away out of his body and he was left a shell, expected by society to function despite the fact that his brain had escaped to seek refuge with the stars long ago.

There was very little time when he actually felt like he was inside his own mind, inside his own body, standing on earth. Most of the time it was like he was scattered in pieces in different places. He felt like his brain had been split into a million fucking horcruxes, and he was completely in the dark about where they'd all been hidden.

Perhaps that was why he was so subconsciously drawn to the stars. Sometimes he would find himself outside at midday, and realise that he had been watching the sky for over an hour, blindly searching for fragments of his soul. His mother never tried to bring him in. She was over the moon that he was finally spending some time outdoors, even if it was just to search for something that didn't exist in a place where nothing was likely to ever be found.

Logic would easily override his hope, but he could never shake the pull of the night sky. Once he looked up, the blue black tendrils of darkness would claw a hold of him, the stars would settle in his eyes, and he never seemed able to drag himself away.